ABSTRACT
In considering the validity of recovered memories of abuse, it is useful to consider the quality of non-abused adults' recall of experiences with their parents, as well as some general principles of retrospective accounts that have emerged from studies of the memory system. It is appropriate to take a broad view of the problem of recovered memories as it touches on so many fundamental aspects of the psychotherapeutic enterprise. A number of commentators on the false memory debate suggest that it is rooted in a popular conceptualization of memory as, at some level, exact and infallible. Trauma-induced memory loss, however, is relatively rare, tending to involve events that follow the experience rather than the experience itself, and is usually to be associated with a single trauma rather than with a series of experiences occurring over a number of years. Psychotherapeutic techniques risk generating false memories, whether or not recovering memory is the goal of therapy.
